NVIDIA today unleashed a graphics card that is sure to whet the appetites of hardcore PC gamers around the world. Unfortunately, the price of entry is so high that only those with massive amounts of disposable income will be likely to take the plunge.

The new GeForce GTX 690 uses dual Kepler GPUs on a single board. Compared to the single-GPU GTX 680, NVIDIA says that performance nearly doubles in most gaming situations. The GTX 690 is of course built on a 28nm process and brings with it 3,072 CUDA cores.

For the truly insane gamers, two GTX 690s can be paired in SLI mode for some quad-core graphics goodness.

"The GTX 690 is truly a work of art -- gorgeous on the outside with amazing performance on the inside," doted Brian Kelleher, senior vice president of GPU engineering at NVIDIA. "Gamers will love playing on multiple screens at high resolutions with all the eye candy turned on. And they'll relish showing their friends how beautiful the cards look inside their systems."

All of this performance comes at a cost, however. The GTX 690 will have an MSRP of $999 when it launches in limited quantities on May 3 -- wider availability will come on May 7.

Still running my 5870 I got nearly 3 years ago, and its running everything great. Might go to a GTX 680, but performance is good enough in most things right now, that I still don't have enough of a reason to upgrade.

I say wait until you actually need it. No sense upgrading just for the hell of it. Get a new card when you need it so you have the lastest instead of always being stuck behind. The only reason I got a 7950 was because my 5970 died.